Looking Over the Field Where He Died
by f.f. lindy
Summary: Field Where I Died post-ep. Scully tries to make sense of Mulder's pain while dealing with her own.


By early evening the compound had gone quiet. The bodies had been removed, the weapons retrieved. Everyone had gone except for her partner. He was standing in the open field in the golden light, clutching two photographs in his hands. He was mourning. She wanted to go to him, to comfort him in his time of need. That was her job as his partner, wasn't it? She knew that she should be there. But, she couldn't bring herself to do it. A bitter jealousy had taken root inside of her ever since she'd seen him hypnotized. "Souls mate eternal," he'd said. And his mate, for all of eternity, was Melissa Riedal-Ephesian, a woman he'd known for mere hours before holding her dead body tenderly in his arms. Scully knew that it should not bother her. She knew the absurdity of what she was feeling. And yet, it was so real.

She leaned against the hood of the Ford Explorer and waited for him. She'd give him all the time he needed to deal with his emotions. That was the least she could do.

What had been so special about Melissa, anyway? She wondered, still staring out at her statuesque partner in the now fading light. If she wasn't his soul mate then why was she suddenly so alluring to him? Was it her illness, her need for a protector, the way she looked so lovingly at him as she spoke? Scully had to admit that Melissa had made a convincing actress. Be it Dissociative Identity Disorder or some other mental illness, she really knew how to play a character. She knew how to make people believe.

Mulder's performance, admittedly, had been impressive too. Even if it had been entirely made up of suggestion, the pain he was feeling, watching his father die in the ghetto streets, was real. It had almost moved her to tears to see it. She hated to see him in pain. She let herself suspend science for a moment and believe it. Maybe that's what he needed right now, someone to recognize that his pain was real.

She could imagine the Cancer man as a Nazi. Even if he didn't look the same, she thought that she could recognize his dark soul the same way she had learned to recognize a shape-shifter version of Mulder wasn't his true self. Would he have been young or old, she asked herself, trying to calculate ages in her mind. The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. How many more years would he have been alive before dying to be reborn as Cancer Man? Even being generous with Cancer Mans age, assuming too many years of cigarettes had prevented graceful aging, the was no way less than 55. The numbers just didn't add up.

Scully's thoughts spun as she unwound the story. Mulder had claimed Melissa was his husband in that life, taken to the death camps. Was she to believe that by the McCarthy Era, that man was Sidney, with a thick New York accent and a penchant for American cultural references? Scully un-furrowed her brow and relaxed for a moment, feeling suddenly more confident in her science. She knew she'd never convince Mulder of these things. He was too deep in it, and too willing to believe. But it was oddly comforting to her bruised ego to be able to factually reason his past lives with Melissa away into fallacy. Hypnotic regression was all about susceptibility to suggestion, she'd seen it time and time again. Mulder was open to suggestion, sometimes to a fault. Yes, he'd managed to pull two names he shouldn't have known. Yes, he'd been able to locate a bunker he shouldn't have known about. But that did not make Melissa his soul mate, it did not make past lives any more credible.

What hurt the most, though, was not really based in the factuality or lack thereof with regards to Mulder's past life memories, but rather his choice of words when interpreting those memories. Melissa was his soul mate, and Scully was nothing more than a friend. As if one lifetime of loving him wasn't enough, he had all but sentenced her to an eternity of playing second fiddle to Melissas and Pheobes and Bambis. The fact that she didn't believe in that eternity didn't quell the hurt. He was still willing point out in so many ways that he was in love with someone else and would see Scully as a father, a sergeant, a partner, but never a woman. Yet somehow, that didn't make her love him any less.

The sky was dark when Mulder finally wandered back to the car to meet her. She reached out a hand to him as he approached and gave his hand a gentle squeeze before getting into the driver's seat and starting the engine. "Thanks for waiting," he said.

"Of course," she said. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he said, unconvincingly.

She knew that it was too soon to bring it up, that he was still too sensitive. She held her tongue and drove through the silence.

"I know you don't believe, Scully. But I appreciate you giving me the time."

"No," she said unabashedly, "I don't believe Mulder. But I know that it doesn't make it any less true to you."

He nodded in gratitude. "I can understand your not believing in past lives, Scully, but don't you believe in love? In things that were just meant to be?"

"Love?" she repeated. "Of course I believe in love." She felt a lump growing in her throat and swallowed it hard, hoping that she'd done so without detection.

"But not soul mates?"

She let a silence linger between them. "No Mulder," she said quietly, eyes focused on the road, "not soul mates."

"But Scully," she saw his smile of incredulity in her peripheral vision, "how can you not believe that there is someone that you were put on this Earth to find? It's not paranormal, Scully, it's not supernatural, it's just love."

"Love is nothing more than the result of increasingly intimate interactions and self-disclosure, Dopamine and Serotonin to attract you to a mate and Vasopressin and Oxytocin to ensure attachment. We're social animals, Mulder, and we do better raising offspring in pairs. Love is our urge to share resources and care for our young." She spoke with precision and calm, but felt bad as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

"What a romantic, Scully."

"I'm not a romantic, Mulder, you should know that by now. I'm a scientist." She knew she was cutting him deeper, but it was all she could do to defend her ego.

"The two aren't mutually exclusive, Scully." She didn't respond, but rather kept her gaze forward on the road. "Remember Bambi and that robot bug engineer?" he grinned widely, hoping to garner a response.

She cracked a smile and rewarded him with a quick, warm glance. "How could I forget?"

"So when did you go all 'love stinks' on me?"

She scoffed a bit. "I didn't exactly say that, Mulder. I just can't believe that we walk around this world like halves of some whole looking for a mate that our spirit will know when we see it. It's just not plausible Mulder. There are too many other factors at play, too much evil in the world. The odds are just too small we'd ever find that person."

"Maybe that explains the divorce rate," he teased again. "But really, Scully, you've never met anyone and just felt immediately connected, like they'd been waiting for you?"

She weighed her words. Of course she had. She'd felt it the minute her small hand was enveloped in his on their first meeting in their basement office. Granted, it may have been in part a result of her youthful naiveté, and in part her excitement about a new adventure, but that first case, that first night in Oregon when they shared their stories, it was like the thing she's been waiting 27 years to find had been assigned to her by some stroke of cosmic fortune. "If you knew me at all, Mulder, you'd already know the answer to that."

He snapped his head around to look at her, gazing at her as if he could see through into the spinning wheels of her mind if he looked hard enough. He watched her for nearly an hour before he gave up in exhaustion and faced the road. They drove along like that for the duration of the 130 miles to Atlanta, both silently looking for the words to say what they didn't know how to express.


End file.
